November 12, 2016

Which One of These Is Not Like the Others?

When the 2016 election campaign got started, the GOP was bragging about their “deep bench” of Presidential candidates. There were dozens of them. And out of that mix, who was selected as their candidate? Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump is clearly not a Republican in spirit but, of course, anyone can declare themselves to be a Republican in fact (or Democrat or …) by fiat.

On the Democratic Party side, a socialist would have been the candidate of that party had there not been people in the Democratic National Committee undermining his campaign and bolstering Hillary Clinton’s. At one point the DNC Chair was introduced on an MSNBC program as a “Clinton surrogate” and no one even blinked.

We came oh, so close to a general election in which a non-Republican would have been contesting with a non-Democrat for the office of president.

So, what does that tell us?

Unless we are totally politically deaf, and that has not yet been demonstrated, it tells us that the status quo is unacceptable. A national government that ignores the desires of its people will not last and neither major party seems to be inclined to do just that.

The people do not want corporations recognized as “persons.” The people want sane gun control regulations. How many polls have shown what the people want, and then were followed by total government inaction or even the reverse being implemented?

People clearly do not want the status quo. So, those in power now have a free hand to make changes. If those changes do not benefit ordinary Americans or run counter to the expressed strong desires of the people, their political lives will be short. As they should be.

The key is the Senate in which the rules allow things like holds on nominations and fillibusters. (The GOP has a policy of stalling all federal bench appointments and has held up almost all of them for months and years is the hope that they will regain the presidency and be able to appoint conservative judges, which the more reasonable Dems would confirm. The Judicial appoint backlog grew to very large numbers and created huge backlogs of cases they were supposed to rule on. GOP did it anyway.) This is how the minority party, the GOP, stalled almost all of the recovery efforts from the Great Recession until they had a majority in one of the two houses, but if you will recall, President Obama had control of both houses of Congress in his first two years but still got very little done.